Neuschwanstein Castle

Turrets and spires, winding stairways and carved wooden chambers, even a golden chandelier -- Germany's Neuschwanstein has everything you could hope for in a fairy-tale castle. (So much so, in fact, that Walt Disney seems to have borrowed heavily from the design for his Sleeping Beauty Castle at Disneyland.)

An architectural fantasy created by "Mad" King Ludwig II, it perches on a forested knoll above a lake, and its theatrical appearance is no accident. Ludwig blasted away part of a mountain peak for the castle's dramatic setting and worked on the drawings with a stage designer rather than an architect. Starting work in 1869, the king yearned to create a dreamlike castle and also to evoke the atmosphere of the Wagnerian operas he loved.

Fourteen laborers spent nearly five years just carving the woodwork in the king's chamber, including an elaborate bed canopy and panels fashioned to look like Gothic windows. A mural portrays the legend of Tristan and Isolde -- one of the castle's many painted scenes from the myths that inspired Wagner's operas.

Ludwig's romantic extravagance is on view everywhere: columns sculpted to resemble palm trees, a royal study where the only fabric used is hand-embroidered silk, a floor made with 2.5 million pieces of marble, and a gilded chandelier that weighs nearly one ton -- not to mention an artificial grotto with stalactites and a rushing waterfall. The windows in the castle frame views that are like pages from a storybook, complete with dark forests, mist-shrouded lakes, and majestic peaks.

To build Neuschwanstein Castle, Ludwig paid out a fortune -- his own as well as the state's. To stop the lavish spending, his alarmed ministers eventually had the king declared insane and removed him from the throne. A few days later, Ludwig drowned under mysterious circumstances, and his fairy-tale castle remained unfinished. The monarch had spent only a few months there, living out his romantic dreams.

Jerry Camarillo Dunn, Jr., has worked with the National Geographic Society for more than 20 years, starting as a staff editor, writer, and columnist at Traveler magazine, then writing travel guides. His latest work is National Geographic Traveler: San Francisco. Dunn’s Smithsonian Guide to Historic America: The Rocky Mountain States has sold more than 100,000 copies. His travel pieces appear in newspapers such as the Chicago Tribune and The Boston Globe. Jerry Dunn's stories have won three Lowell Thomas Awards from the Society of American Travel Writers -- the highest honor in the field. He also wrote and hosted a pilot episode for a travel show produced by WGBH, Boston's public television station.

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